This blog documents the preservation of the Brookwood Phone Box.
The kiosk was decommissioned by British Telecom in early 2009, and acquired by the local council to be preserved for the village.
A small team of villagers set about restoring the phone box, and then preserving it for future generations.
You may contact the author at contact@brookwood-expo.org.uk if you would like advice on restoring your kiosk.

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Sunday, 4 April 2010

A corner turned

Excellent progress today, it feels like we have turned a corner and are on the home straight. The railings were our number one priority as they really get in the way when trying to scrape the paint off the fourth side. The picture to the right shows Alan using his acetylene torch to cut through the bolts. Unfortunately we ran out of gas, and needed to hack saw the remainder off.

Once these were sawn through, we went to remove the railings and discovered what we think is the electricity cable naked in the dirt running through the railings rather than under them. This is GPO/BT bodging in the extreme and to me highly dangerous. Luckily my brother is an electrician, so he will advise us on how best to protect and route this in the safest way possible. The picture here shows the problem. We eventually removed the railings by hammering out the top bar and then feeding the railings around the cable. In the same picture you can see how the uprights have rusted through and snapped off.

Once the railings were out, we bolted in two bars that Alan had made up which will provide sufficient stability to ensure the posts are still in place when we finish refurbishing the railings later on in the summer.

As can be seen from the picture, we have dug out a load more dirt, and the back is sufficiently exposed now to make scraping the remaining paint off the fourth side easier. We scraped a fair amount off that side and the remainder I expect to complete with a couple of hours work. When digging out the dirt we found part of an original large cast iron glazing frame.

Another turning point today was removing the unit from within the kiosk that the 'phone and money box would have been bolted to. This had also proved to be difficult as one of the bolts was seized solid. The picture here shows Alan drilling the bolt out. This is quite a heavy bit of kit, and will be kept but will not be bolted back on the board.

The only other thing we did today was to scrape a fair bit of paint off the third side. The crown is almost fully exposed, and I expect to finish that this coming week.

Finally, with the wall unit out, I rearranged the posters in the kiosk. The two spaces are for the poster from Glassmaster, and the centre poster will consist of the names of all the donors to the project.

As I said at the start of this post, we feel like we are on the home straight, all the structual stuff is completed, which means we can finish scraping the paint this coming week (including the domed roof). So next weekend, we intend on preparing the whole kiosk for a complete priming with red oxide which we'll do either next weekend if we get time, or will be done the following weekend. The weekend April 24/25 we will paint the kiosk with the correct red 539 paint if the weather allows us. With the glass arriving on the 30 April, we will fit the glass that bank holiday weekend.